A service account provides an identity for processes that run in a Pod.
When you (a human) access the cluster (for example, using kubectl), you are authenticated by the apiserver as a particular User Account (currently this is usually admin, unless your cluster administrator has customized your cluster). Processes in containers inside pods can also contact the apiserver. When they do, they are authenticated as a particular Service Account (for example, default).
When you create a pod, if you do not specify a service account, it is automatically assigned the default service account in the same namespace. If you get the raw json or yaml for a pod you have created (for example, kubectl get pods/ -o yaml), you can see the spec.serviceAccountName field has been automatically set.
You can access the API from inside a pod using automatically mounted service account credentials, as described in Accessing the Cluster. The API permissions of the service account depend on the authorization plugin and policy in use.
In version 1.6+, you can opt out of automounting API credentials for a service account by setting automountServiceAccountToken: false on the service account:
apiVersion: v1
kind: ServiceAccount
metadata:
name: build-robot
automountServiceAccountToken: false
In version 1.6+, you can also opt out of automounting API credentials for a particular pod:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
name: my-pod
spec:
serviceAccountName: build-robot
automountServiceAccountToken: false
The pod spec takes precedence over the service account if both specify a automountServiceAccountToken value.
